Information technology is revolutionizing products. Once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts, products have become complex systems that combine hardware, sensors, data storage, microprocessors, software, and connectivity in myriad ways. These “smart, connected products”—made possible by vast improvements in processing power and device miniaturization and by the network benefits of ubiquitous wireless connectivity—have unleashed […]

Richard Platt's insight:

Another leap in productivity in the economy will be unleashed by these new and better products. In addition, producing them will reshape the value chain yet again, by changing product design, marketing, manufacturing, and after-sale service and by creating the need for new activities such as product data analytics and security. This will drive yet another wave of value-chain-based productivity improvement. The third wave of IT-driven transformation thus has the potential to be the biggest yet, triggering even more innovation, productivity gains, and economic growth than the previous two. - Some have suggested that the internet of things “changes everything,” but that is a dangerous oversimplification. As with the internet itself, smart, connected products reflect a whole new set of technological possibilities that have emerged. But the rules of competition and competitive advantage remain the same. Navigating the world of smart, connected products requires that companies understand these rules better than ever.

Smart homes, machines with feelings, algorithm police and self-regulated transport networks are just some of the exciting concepts explored in a new b

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Dr. Bates, chief marketing officer, head of industry solutions and member of the executive board, Software AG noted: “Thingalytics is happening now. Market leaders and fast followers are in the midst of a digital transformation. This brave new world of smarter machines, and the humans who engage them, will change every industry and every market segment. It will also change how we live our lives.”

The big problem with SSDs is that the $ / GB is still dramatically higher than a conventional hard disk, but consumers really love the better performance, durability and size of flash storage. - 3D NAND doesn't promise to make SSD storage cheaper, but having more capacity is certainly welcome news to anyone who has hit the limit of the storage on their current SSD equipped Mac, or high end PC or laptop. - It'll be a while before 3D NAND drives hit the market: Wired says that you won't see 3D NAND in the wild until late this year or perhaps early 2016.

First, there’s Vapor IO CORE (Core Operating Runtime Environment). This is designed to provide an open interface that applications and operating systems can query to make decisions about scale, efficiency and power consumption. Vapor IO has also announced the Open Data Center Runtime Environment (Open DCRE) as an open-source infrastructure management and analytics platform that it’s contributed to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Open DCRE includes sensors and firmware to track metrics like power usage effectiveness (PUE) and environmental data such as humidity and airflow. You can help use this to allocate workloads.

The second part of Vapor's vision is the Vapor Chamber. Instead of using a traditional server rack line with a hot side and a cold side, the Vapor Chamber assembles server blades in a 9-foot diameter cylinder, so that a single fan system can rationalise airflow to control temperature as required.

Claiming to be able to lower both data centre capex and opex, the suggestion is the hardware could be tied more closely to increasingly complex workloads.

Looking for a practical example of the internet of things actually being useful? The Sydney Harbour Bridge is here to answer your call.Picture: Hai L...

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Those joints are designed to move, allowing the bridge to cope with both winds and the pressures of traffic. It can rise and fall 18cm, and expand and contract by 42cm. To make that process work, however, the joints have to be monitored and maintained. “If the two joints move in harmony and unison, that’s OK,” Gambrill said. “If they move in a different order, it’s a problem.”

The previous approach has been maintenance when a problem is identified, but being able to fix and replace joints that are about to break would be far more efficient and less costly. Gambrill said the current reactive system was 10 times more expensive.

To achieve that, NICTA plans to deploy 2400 sensors across the bridge — 1500 are already in place. These are designed purely to monitor the condition of the bridge. “Instead of the asset manager having to deploy his maintenance staff, he gets a dashboard for all monitored joints showing their status as green, amber or red.”

In the iPhone's current camera system, individual pixels can capture red, green and blue lights, which are scattered all over a single image sensor. But that means each color only gets one-third of the space on the sensor. By splitting the light with this proposed cube, each color can have an entire sensor to itself, which would allow for more accurate colors, and much better images in low-light scenarios. Yep this would very likely be disruptive and it would meet our definition of what innovation is, an incremental improvement in value (that someone is willing to pay for)

The Amazon orders of the future won’t be fulfilled by humans in warehouses, they’ll be carried out by fleets of robots. And our duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Fortunately, [...]

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The Amazon orders of the future won’t be fulfilled by humans in warehouses, they’ll be carried out by fleets of robots. And our duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Fortunately, if workers must be tasked with manufacturing the very machines putting them all out of work, at least it’ll be entertaining to watch. The online retail giant is holding a contest to find the next-generation of robots capable of doing the company’s bidding faster than you ever could.

The resolution commits the nation to incentivizing the development of the Internet of Things.

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The resolution is an “important first step in ushering new ideas and innovations for years to come,” Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb.,said in a statement after the measure was passed. - Still, lawmakers are searching for a balance between developing adequate policy safeguards and stifling technological advances. “Innovation and free-market principles must drive our hands-off regulatory approach, not overregulation,” Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said in a statement.

While the Internet of Everything has huge a potential to transform our daily lives, it is still very much in its infancy. Existing technology and internet infrastructure have a long way to before we can truly begin to realise the true capabilities of IoE and it achieves mainstream adoption. -

Lynn Collier, COO at HDS UK gives her input:

“While the development of IoT solutions is still in its infancy, the challenge for both vendors and channel partners is to clearly demonstrate the underlying business benefits. Most importantly, how will the promise of IoT help to deliver a better customer experience? - “Bringing together people, process, data and connected devices will undoubtedly have a significant impact on a number of industries. With Gartner predicting it will take five to ten years before IoT reaches mainstream adoption, vendors and partners need to prioritise educating customers now on the what the promise holds to increase awareness and adoption, but also on solutions available today which will deliver value and that all important stepping stone to the future. Through developing business-driven use cases, vendors and partners will help to demonstrate how IoT solutions can improve the bottom line whilst also benefitting customers.”

The new office aims to address all consumer technological risks, according to Chief Technologist Ashkan Soltani.

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A little more on the recent FTC decision to create a new Office of Technology Research and Investigation - The office evolved from the agency's mobile technology unit, an entity the commission created a few years ago to address mobile technology’s own unique consumer protection challenges associated with smartphones and other mobile devices, according to Ashkan Soltani, FTC's chief technologist. - “The hope is to bring all of these individuals together, with a few more additional hires to form this more broad office of technology research that’s not just mobile specific but is looking at other issues,” Soltani told Nextgov.

Kristin Cohen, the current chief of the mobile unit, will lead the new unit. - The mobile unit currently has about 15 lawyers and technologists who are expected to shift over to the new office. The commission also plans to hire two new staff members and a handful of technology interns, Soltani said. - The office is also expected to work closely with the agency's "Internet Lab," which uses digital tools to protect consumers.

Companies aim to squeeze more efficiency from operations by cloud-connecting everything.

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It's when data from networked sensors is fused with other sources (like the tree survey) that it becomes valuable. On the lower end of the analytics space, there are tools like Wolfram's Data Drop, which can take in data from anything that can send it via HTTP and add semantic structure to it for analysis. For larger systems, like GE's Predix, it all goes into a "data lake"—a giant cloud storage pool of structured and unstructured data that can be programmatically accessed by analytics tools. - But all that data is useless without good analytics, and simply matching raw sensor numbers by timestamps isn't enough to understand what's going on historically or in realtime. That's where data science comes in. "Data science is all about building models on any kind of data that represents physical phenomena," Christina Brasco, a data scientist at GE Software in San Ramon, told Ars. "We're building analytic engines that might be working on numbers a mathematical model produced, and not on raw data."

Oregon News Coverage, Sports, Politics, Interviews. 26 newspapers all covering what is important for you locally.

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The e-bike’s 36-volt electric motor gives extra oomph on hills and eases pedal power on the flat. The McDowells plan to use their new Mahindra GenZe e-bikes as supplemental transportation on a long adventure around the United States later this year; Bekegrede is using his to ride 10 miles to work. - The Mahindra GenZe, a company based in India with new roots in the San Francisco Bay area. The company opened their shop in bike-happy Portland in November.

"You do get people looking at you strangely, but the tampon is not that obvious."

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Strange but true - Why? It turns out tampons are an accurate and cheap way to sample water quality. - “Grey water” contamination is a common problem — water from dishwashers, showers, and laundry that ends up in the storm sewer via incompetent plumbing or deliberate dumping. Before you decide that grey wash water isn’t that bad, as an FYI all sorts of non-lovely things live in your washing machine: norovirus and rotavirus; human pathogenic fungi; and of course a wide variety of fecal bacteria. Dishwashers are not much better. - Now if we could only make those glowing tampons "smart" and let us know when it's got some nasty pathogens and send information to the researcher.

Middleware standards based on open source could be the glue that pulls IOT solutions together.

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"Device manufacturers have taken up open source software at the operating system level at a 40% - 50% share, but there's also a lot of proprietary and legacy software embedded in devices and that will continue," says Bill Weinberg, senior director at Black Duck Software. - "And applications will probably be proprietary because they represent an opportunity, at least in the mind of device manufacturers, to provide exclusive differentiation,"

Today: Google strikes deal with Johnson & Johnson to make robots that can assist surgeons, launching a new challenge to Sunnyvale's Intuitive Surgical. Also: Intel, Altera soar after reports of merger.

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Google and a Johnson & Johnson unit announced Friday that they will be working together to make robots that can assist in surgeries, a strategic collaboration with no price tag announced. The aim of the project appears to be similar to the da Vinci robots manufactured and sold by Sunnyvale's Intuitive Surgical, the third largest public Silicon Valley company in the biotech/health care sector. - Google stressed that the life sciences team at Google X will only be providing software and sensors for the proposed systems, with J&J's Ethicon unit handling the rest of work.

In its recent report, The Identity of Things (IDoT) for the Internet of Things, Gartner lays out how it believes the Internet of Things (IoT), or what is o

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"A strikingly common misconception I come across in the industry, says Neil Chapman of ForgeRock, is that IoT is just about introducing different types of devices into business scenarios. It’s not. - Businesses looking to harness IoT in fact require a completely different approach to viewing and implementing processing, analytics, storage, and communications. Certainly, identifying ‘who’s who, what’s what, and who gets access to what’ is one aspect. But how this is processed, managed, protected, stored, and communicated is a whole new kettle of fish for businesses.

As the second day of its F8 conference began here at Fort Mason in San Francisco, Facebook announced the first hardware it plans to use to beam the Internet..

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Codenamed Aquila, the drone has a wingspan comparable to a Boeing 767 yet uses lightweight materials that allow it to weigh less than a car. - Aquila has to be incredibly light, because it’s going to be kept aloft for as long as three months at a time using solar power. Just staying in the air for that long is a challenge, but Facebook’s also going to be pushing Internet access down to people 60,000-90,000 feet below using lasers, as well as maintaining communications between drones to maintain coverage across wider regions.

Is this the world’s cheapest refrigerator? Launched by Indian conglomerate Godrej and Boyce, ChotuKool's $69 price tag is not the only reason it can be called super economical.

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Is this the world’s cheapest refrigerator? Launched by Indian conglomerate Godrej and Boyce, ChotuKool's $69 price tag is not the only reason it can be called super economical. The portable, top-opening unit weighs only 7.8kg, uses high-end insulation to stay cool for hours without power and consumes 1/2 the energy used by regular refrigerators. - To achieve its efficiency the ChotuKool doesn't use a compressor, instead running on a cooling chip and a fan similar to those used in computers, so like computers it can run on batteries. It's engineering credentials are further boosted by the fact that it has only 20 parts, as opposed to more than 200 parts in a normal refrigerator. - The ChotuKool was co-designed with village women to assure its acceptability, and is distributed by members of a micro-finance group. - "It’s a reverse engineering of sorts,” says G. Sunderraman, Vice President of Corporate Development at Godrej & Boyce.

During a House Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce meeting, lawmakers considered how the Internet of Things could move beyond consumer products.

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As part of a question-and-answer session, Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., asked what the United States could learn from other nations’ approach to the Internet of Things -- especially against the backdrop of public crises like California's ongoing drought.

Rose Schooler, vice president of Intel Corp.’s Internet of Things business group, noted that the U.S. is behind other nations, including Germany, Brazil and China, which already have national plans on the topic. India has used smarter technology to rebuild its decaying water-pipe infrastructure, reducing waste, said Daniel Castro, director of the Center for Data Innovation, a Washington think tank.

“In the U.S., there’s still some hesitancy because that’s not how we are used to doing it," Schooler said. "We have to start embracing technology in a much more aggressive fashion than we have in the past."

On Tuesday, it was announced that Apple has snapped up FoundationDB, maker of the eponymously named database technology. Apple acquired the company and technology in order to help it crunch the ever-increasing quantities of data that it holds. Apple, in its own inimitable way, confirmed the deal but refused to discuss [...]

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Apple is essentially saying that everything that FoudnationDB, and its community, created during the lifetime of the project is now wrapped up and for the sole benefit of Cupertino. Ouch. Developer community is not happy, guess they won't be buying any of those new Apple Watches as a result.

This new area of technology may see the smartwatch replace what is now viewed as an essential. But are people actually willing to give up their phone and talk into their wrist like a scene out of a sci-fi film? "35 percent of respondents said they would feel “embarrassed” if they wore it". There is undoubtedly money to be made as this technology can enhance people's lives, but how practical is it right now?

Britons are yet to be convinced that wearable tech will change their lives for the better, with one-in-10 people thinking that it will make their day-to-day existence more difficult

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Survey of 2000 UK adults by Hive for British Gas "Just 25% people believe that wearable technology will improve their day-to-day life, a new survey shows, while 10% of Britons thinks that wearable technology will actually make their lives harder. - By contrast, 56% of respondents are looking forward to the benefits of connected home devices, 43% expect artificial intelligence to make life easier, and 33% people think driverless cars and 3D printers will improve their everyday experiences. - I wonder how the US population and the ROW (Rest Of the World) see these technologies, may illustrate a path forward for firms.

From smartphones to cars and defense missiles, modern U.S. life depends on rare earth elements but China dominates the industry

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Most modern devices, laptops, cell phones, touch rely upon Rare Earth Minerals, (REM) China overtook the US around 2008 as the major producer, refiner and manufacturer of REM. Here is 60 Minutes investigation into what happened and how it impacts now and in the future.

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